WANTED: Window Cleaner For The Shard

Been looking to take your career to the next level?

Fancy getting paid to abseil down The Shard? It needs a window cleaner - A social enterprise is looking for people with a head for heights who want to be The Shard’s window cleaners. The unique opportunity was posted on jobs site Good People Connect, and pays up to £20,000 a year, depending on experience. You need to have abseiled before for the role, working 6am to 2pm six days a week, and need to be unemployed and living in Southwark. Here’s a video showing what the window cleaners at The Shard do:

WANTED: Window Cleaner for The Shard - Consider yourself a frustrated high-flyer? Been looking to take your career to the next level? Fancy peering through the glass ceiling from the other side for a change? Well this could be the role you’ve been looking for!

Social enterprise Good People Connect is looking for talented people with around five years of window cleaning experience to help maintain London’s foremost monument to wealth – The Shard. The deal is six days a week, around £20k a year, with a bucket and squeegee provided. Oh, and you have to live in Southwark. Talk about a high bar to entry. See the full job description below or here.

Hideously risky poorly paid job puts banking compensation into perspective: How much should you get paid for dangling on a rope and cleaning windows up to 360m above ground level? More pertinently, how much should you get paid for dangling on a rope and cleaning windows 360m above ground level when you also have -

a. Five years’ experience in this art.

b. Willingness to work six days a week.

c. A qualification in working at heights?

Try….£320 – £390 ($535 – $662) per week. This is how much is currently being offered to ‘experienced vertical window cleaners at the Shard,’ the new iconic landmark on London’s South Bank. Needless to say, this is less than half the amount typically paid to front office summer interns at investment banks, who have yet to leave university.

Knowing how little the Shard’s cleaners are paid may not do much to directly further your finance career. However, it may make you feel more appreciative of what you’ve got – our survey earlier this year suggested that 40% of bankers in the City of London were unhappy with their bonuses for 2013.

Richard Miranda, a spokesperson for GoodPeopleConnect, the social recruitment agency which is advertising the Shard-cleaning positions, says they’ve had ten applications so far. The level of pay is fairly typical for window cleaning, even at heights, says Miranda. “We don’t set the prices – we just make sure that we don’t deal with zero hours contracts and that it will lead to long term sustainable employment,” he says.

In 2012, a window cleaner at the Shard had to be rescued after his ‘cradle’ swung wildly in a gust of high wind. And yet it could be worse – the jobs could be at Pret a Manger. 

More Shard news here.